Seek My Face (15 page)

“Kathryn, could I offer you a little lunch? I don’t know quite what I have—sliced smoked turkey for a sandwich, or a can of tuna I could make into salad. You must be starved. I am.”

In a gush of innocent self-promotion the young woman says, “Oh, when I’m interested in what I’m doing I totally forget to eat. Then around four I wonder why I feel so light-headed. But you get up so early, and—”

Are old and frail
, she doesn’t say,
and have so few pleasures other than food
. Food and reminiscence. What is it, in our pasts, that we keep trying to recover, what misplaced marvel trod under in our haste to live the days, the days which, once gone, acquire the majesty of eternal testimony—
I was there, I did this, the times were such, I was beautiful and pregnant with my potential, my beautiful future
?

“I’m fine,” Hope briskly assures Kathryn. “Let’s go to the end of this tape. It will do our figures good. Ask me your worst.”

“The ‘groupie.’ Have you ever read her memoir? It’s better than you might expect, and presents rather a different image of Zack than the one you’re presenting. Clever, suave even, a man of the world, not just the art world.”

“Clever, so clever he would have killed her if she hadn’t been thrown clear of the convertible when he crashed it into the woods. The friend she had along wasn’t so lucky, she got under the car when it flipped. Not Zack—he flew straight ahead into the trunk of an oak like a human cannonball.
The coffin was closed at the service because his head was such a mess.” The word “mess” stops her tongue, it tastes and stings of something lost, a word Zack was fond of, using it of a painting in which his attempt to overpaint and efface the image had gone too far, to the point where he razored out sections to let life back in. “No, I’ve not read the groupie’s book. It could only be self-serving and semi-literate.”

Kathryn looks startled; Hope’s tone is new to her, and her terms are outside the non-judgmental critical vocabulary she is used to. As if improving her hearing, she lightly strokes the long black strands of hair above her ear, and carefully responds, “It might not be entirely painful, if you could bring yourself to read it. She writes that, after you gave him the ultimatum and went off to Europe, she moved in expecting to take over, but after the first week of her living in the house, mostly in her underwear—it was especially hot that summer, evidently—he became quite unmanageable. He wouldn’t eat the elaborate meals she cooked, he wouldn’t defend her when your old friends snubbed her, he drank a case of beer a day. They didn’t make love. When he looked at her he only saw you, she writes. She had told the friend who died under the car that it would never work, even though he was everything she wanted, a great artist. Her book keeps this starstruck tone, but she admits she can’t imagine how they would have gone on together. You were still too much on his mind.”

“As I said, ‘pathetic,’ ” Hope says, her own tone pitiless. Kathryn really should stop feeding her this stale fare, fare once possibly delicious to scandal-mongers and art lovers but after nearly fifty years quite tasteless. Zack had re-enacted with—what was her name? a boy’s name—Meredith for two weeks the inchoate callousness she had endured for ten
years. Long before Zack stirred himself to find another woman, or she had found him in the celebrity-stalking grounds the Cedar Tavern had become, Hope realized that the marriage was ruined. As long as he was painting, gesturing with his thinned enamels above great rectangles of canvas that accepted swirls of aluminum, lavender, brown, and white to become shimmers of motion, atoms, breath, the speckled depth of air itself; as long as his annual shows at Peggy’s and then at Betty’s, after Betty had, very much against her own better judgment, taken over Peggy’s miserly arrangement with Zack when Peggy upped and went to Europe, were faithfully listed in the art journals as among the year’s best; as long as there were a few sales and his name penetrated the murmur of national publicity as an anointed one; as long, in effect, as there was work to do that only he in the history of all art could do, the dazed rapacity of his self-regard could be borne, and she could imagine herself a partner and believe that the daily gift of herself was in some heavenly gold ledger taken into account. But when, in the wake of that film by the directorial German, Zack began to drink in earnest again, and she resumed, in that ill-lit little room upstairs, her own painting, as her only path to an orderly future, then the true face of her marriage showed itself and terrified her. One mid-morning, at that time of day when, new to the Island, they would be bending and stooping in their garden, which was now a neglected weed-patch whose fencing sagged and whose half-rotted gate built by Zack no longer swung open, he came up the stairs, with heavy feet, to this studio of hers and looked at the wet canvas on the easel and the others stacked dried and hardened along the walls, and said, at last, his tongue thick, “Not bad. Not great, but not bad.”

Her voice came out edgier, with more fight in it, than
she wanted. She was on her own ground, narrow as it was. “At least I’m giving it a try. I’m not hiding behind booze and bombing around in an old Olds bothering our friends. The few friends we have left.” The Ford had been replaced by a great white boat of a second-hand Olds convertible behind whose wheel Zack had become even more of a hazard to himself and others.

“What the fuck’re you talking about?” He seemed genuinely not to know.

“You, Zack. I’m talking about you.”

“These so-called friends say I’m bothering them?”

“They don’t have to say it. Just look at their faces when you stumble in. Look at the way people at parties move to the other side of the room to avoid you, because you want to pick a fight.”

His eyes glanced down in embarrassment. “Fuck ’em all. Who are these people?”

“Roger. Onno. Bernie. Bernie said to me he tries to put up with you for my sake. Even Clem, who was your biggest booster not so long ago and thinks he made your name and gave you the theory you needed to function, even Clem avoids you.”

“He screwed me in his last review.”

“He’s worried for you. He wants you to go back to work. Serious work.” There was a heavy fragrant danger in his near presence; she heard his breathing—moist, strained by the climb up the stairs—close behind her as she tried to apply a long smooth stroke of alazarin crimson to balance a red spot high in the picture, like a sun burning through sea fog. She had wanted the canvas to be wild, full of push and pull, but it was coming out muted, foggy, composed with a strictness and care she could not shake.

“Clem’s a shit. I made
him
, not him me. Roger’s a pansy.
At least for Chrissake you’ve stopped imitating him, all that blank white and portal of life or whatever shit.”

This had, in its rough humor, a muffled ring of conciliation. Hope took the moment of remission from Zack’s clumsy pressure to try to gauge if the streak of crimson did spring the rest of the canvas into the life that Hochmann had believed arose from tension between colors.

Zack saw where her eyes went, away from him, and resented it. “It stinks, if you must know,” he told her. “It stinks of landscape. There’s the fucking sun, peeking through the fucking gray clouds. Look, here’s our fucking house, there’s the barn, these fucking wiggles must be our trees.” In gesturing, his fingers scraped the wet paint, and he wiped his hand on her smock. The smock was covered in paint anyway, but it enraged her.

“Don’t touch me, you stupid lush. And keep your fingers out of my painting. You don’t know what you’re doing.”

The crease between his eyebrows deepened. “I’m a lush and you’re a cunt,” he explained to her with a lofty alcoholic calm. “Cunts can’t paint. There are pots and brushes, pots don’t paint. They don’t stick out. Sticks and brushes paint. Look.” With the blunt end of a brush resting in the trough of the easel he jabbed the wet paint, making one of his sloppy hieroglyphs.

“Zack, I said don’t touch my goddamn canvas.”

“I’m giving it some value. Here, I’ll sign it, my piece of it. The priceless piece. This’ll make it worth a million bucks someday.” He bent over, wheezing through his nose, to scribble his scribbly signature with the wrong end of the brush across her wet streak of alazarin crimson. She had never liked his signature, it looked semi-literate to her. She knocked his head away, so a smear of paint came off her smock sleeve onto the glossy bald front of his skull.
Her elbow stung, and must have hurt him, for his eyes watered and narrowed so their tawny color disappeared. He said, still striving out of his daze to be her teacher, “You hoity-toity twat, the greatest painter in the world is giving you advice. Hang it up. Your stuff is crap. Pseudo-representational crap. You never got it, Hope. Your hero Hochmann was a kraut phony who never got it either. He could talk till it ran out his ass, but he didn’t have the guts to be a real painter. You’re like him, trying to think your fucking way in.”

“Let me alone, Zack. Let me paint an hour a day and the rest of the time I’ll be your idiotic slave. Just for an hour, that’s all I ask. I’m stuck with you out here with nobody but those bums you meet at the Lemon Tree for company—you’ve offended everybody else, we never get asked anywhere, over at Onno’s or Bernie’s the whole room freezes when you stagger in.”

She kept at this aspect of things because it pained him to think it true, he fancied himself a charmer in spite of everything, the baby brother, his mother’s pet, and he kept at her painting because he knew this was the way to hurt her, her sore spot. He had one thought, to sting, to attack; he was like one of the bumblebees he painted into his own drips; the paint hardened and the bee’s furry dry body was there forever, mummified. “You poor cunt, trying to think your way in. Stop thinking. Stop standing here. Nothing’s going to happen. Go the fuck downstairs and do a little housecleaning, the place looks like a pigsty. My mother when she was here last—”

“Your mother, don’t throw her up to me, she kept house and that was all she did, it was delusional, she thought if she crocheted enough doilies it would make it all respectable, but you weren’t respectable, you were a bunch of fatherless
undisciplined riffraff who left home as quick as you all could, the only thing she ever loved was the appearance of respectability, of being a cut above what she really was.”

“My mother was a damn brave woman. She kept us fed and dressed on the dole Dad sent and kept a damn nice home. Other kids used to want to come home with me, our home was so nice. She’d give them cookies she’d baked herself. She didn’t live in any Main Line mansion lousy with servants, she did it all herself. What you can’t get through your thick little head is that we don’t have any servants, we’re the servants.”

“
I’m
the servant, you mean to say. I do all the cooking, the cleaning, I make the beds, I try to do the lawn since you’ve given up and do nothing but drink, if the house looks like a pigsty it’s because a pig lives in it—
you
. A pig drunk as a skunk. No wonder our friends hate us. Our former friends. Your colleagues. They pity us, Zack.”

“I’m the greatest painter in the world and they know it. That Italian paper said I made Picasso a painter of the past, what did it say,
povero Picasso
? Listen, you poor snotty cunt. My mother is six times the woman you’ll ever be.” Fury had momentarily burned the fog from his brain, but now he was rambling and stumbling again.

“Get out of this room, please,” Hope said. “This is my
povero
little studio, it’s dark and tiny but it’s mine, the one place around here I can find some peace and self-respect.”

Zack stood there, a bumblebee stuck in paint, his puzzled face seeking some distillation, some moral that the mention of his mother reminded him lay at the base of every circumstance. “A woman’s place,” he came out with, “is behind a broom or on her back.” It sounded like something he had picked up at the Lemon Drop.

“Oh?” Hope said. “Is that how you want me? On my
back? Let’s go, big boy, it’s been ages. Just give me a minute to clean my brushes and slip in my diaphragm.”

“O.K., never mind.”

“Zack, can’t you see, you can’t even fuck any more? You must get help.”

“The point of fucking is kids,” he said.

“Oh, that again. As if you’re in shape to be a father. The point of fucking is health, psychological-emotional health.”

“Is that what it is?” he mocked. “Drop dead, Hope. You’re not my shrink.” But she had succeeded in chasing him away; he was turning his back. “Go fuck somebody else.”

They would soon be beyond recall. “No, Zack. Wait. You don’t mean that. I didn’t mean half the things I said, I just get so frustrated, because I love you.”

“Like I said, go fuck somebody else. Get off my case.”

Half turned away, he heavily turned back to face her, to give her his face, puffy and with a smear of alazarin-red paint where her elbow had struck his high forehead, but still his, those three dimples, the rings of muscle, still giving an impression of amiability and masculine resource. “Get off my fucking case,” he repeated, stuck, and tried to focus on her but failed, and the flutter of love, the urgent impulse of reconciliation, died within her in horror at what she saw: he didn’t care. He didn’t care about her. She had become a mere noise in his ear, an impediment to his vision; he cared only about the quest at the back of his brain, the quest in the barn, where he was finding nothing now. He used to sit and stare at the canvases in progress for hours, but then he would act, he would add paint. Now he did nothing. In his wounded alcoholic brain he was stuck, and she was no help, she was nothing to him, she was a figure in a haze so thick she could be there or not, if anything he hated her, because
she made claims, as a fly buzzing makes claims, busily landing on your wrist and lips and creating an unendurable tickle; he needed silence and stillness, all he cared about was art, the fire at the back of the cave, and the rest of the world was illusion, bothersome distraction, he would flick her off like that fly and not even notice she was gone in his leaden dedication to something else, a sacrifice of all that was orderly and decent and daily in the world to the sullen, obsessive blaze of his art, his stupid, selfish art. In his stuckness lately he had reverted in some black-on-white paintings to imagery, faces and figures, doodles making clear again what the drip paintings had so dazzlingly concealed: he could not draw. The face which she had always thought beautiful with its puzzled frown and tawny watchful eyes struck her now as a wall, an ungrateful blankness at which she had thrown her young life and wasted it. Even now, the remembered revelation puts a caustic taste in her mouth, the taste of faucet water that has travelled miles through corroded pipes.